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Life doesn’t always go how you think it’s going to. Songs can be like that, too. Those two things intersected on “Fine Line,” a brand-new track from Fellow Travelers that feels marinated in the challenges and curveballs experienced by project leader Max Niemann.
First up for Niemann was finding a home for this guitar lick he had kicking around his brain for the better part of a year while waiting for the right words to come along. Fortunately, a verse and chorus emerged to help “Fine Line” start blooming. The unfortunate part was the life events that fueled those lyrics.
A car with a busted strut. A family member’s funeral. A day-to-day existence that suddenly felt impossible to maintain.
“It was a time where trying to maintain the balance of pursuing a career in music, staying afloat financially, and being present for family and friends felt like an insurmountable task,” Niemann explained. “At some point, something’s gotta give.
“I guess that’s a big part of what the song is trying to get at — finding the balance between your own dreams and ambitions and the reality of a situation, but also knowing that no matter how hard you try, you can’t hold onto everything along the way. It’s a fine line, as they say.”
Niemann says it himself in a song that name-checks those difficulties: “I'd run away anywhere else / If I could just afford to fix that strut.” “All that's dying / And we're all digging in.” “And it's a hard line between arriving / And keeping up with all of these odds and ends.”
The simple conclusion? “It's a fine line / Sure as shit / Long as you mind / Giving it.”
We’ve all had those moments when life would be a lot easier if we just didn’t care so much, and another one of the lower-stakes variety came up when it was time to record the song itself. Pitching in on the production, fellow Milwaukee musician Maximiano heard the distorted electric guitar Niemann wanted to lay down and pointed him toward an acoustic axe instead. The two didn’t see eye-to-eye, which is why it’s a good thing that recording is more of an ear situation.
“After a bit of pushback on my part,” Niemann reported, “I realized Maximiano was right as soon as we played it once with the new arrangement.”
He added that the song reverts to “the more raucous” iteration in a live setting, but the recorded version you’ll hear when you tap that “Listen” button at the top of the page jives beautifully with the exhausted resignation of the lyrics.
Niemann’s emphatic strumming melds with Evan Ceman’s pedal steel and Gunnar Schmitz’s electric guitar work; Isabel Schmenk’s violin is a lovely, rootsy touch; and the rhythm section of Alex Niemann (bass) and Miller Matthews (drums) urge things onward to a conclusion that’s oddly satisfying for a song about life’s relentlessly punishing nature.
In addition to hearing the song on demand right here, you can catch it on 88Nine throughout today (6:30 and 10:30 a.m.; 2:30 and 6:30 p.m.). The track will also get released as a single this Friday before joining its album-mates on Fellow Travelers’ upcoming LP, Don’t Fail Me Now, which is out Sept. 18. Live dates are in the works for the weeks and months ahead, but for now you can definitely find the band July 25 at Brady Street Fest, where they’ll play the West Main Stage at 4 p.m.
